The present disclosure relates in general to semiconductor manufacturing technology, and more particularly, to a system and method to provide a multi-project wafer to a user without sacrificing proprietary circuit information of other customers.
With the advancement of VLSI technologies, the mask cost has been dramatically increased. The shuttle mask solution, also known as multi-project wafer (MPW), has been widely accepted as an economical solution for product prototyping and small volume production by putting different chips on a mask set to share the mask costs through a multiple-project wafer. For example, in a simple MPW cost model where each design is mainly charged based on the area it occupies on the mask, the mask cost will be greatly reduced because the mask cost is shared by multiple designs
However, the delivery of multi-project wafers create proprietary information concerns, because customers' designs are exposed to others who share the same mask and wafer. One current technique to address this proprietary information concern is to cut the fabricated integrated circuits (die) from the wafer to provide customers only their own die. Each die having a specific customer's design is placed in a waffle tray and delivered to the corresponding customer.
While this technique protects proprietary information from being exposed to other customers, this may not meet the customer's needs. For example, wafer level testing or packaging in the prototyping stage may not be performed because only individual dies, not the full wafer, are provided to the customer. This also affects the customer's time-to-market and their abilities to collect statistical circuit information from the bare dies singulated from a wafer. Therefore, a need exists for a method and system for providing a multi-project wafer to a user, such that the user may perform wafer level testing and packaging without improperly exposing other's proprietary information.